Don’t Make Me Think: Revisited

ux

Since Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug’s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it’s one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject.

Rocket Surgery Made Easy

ux

It's been known for years that usability testing can dramatically improve products. But with a typical price tag of $5,000 to $10,000 for a usability consultant to conduct each round of tests, it rarely happens.

In this how-to companion to Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug spells out a streamlined approach to usability testing that anyone can easily apply to their own Web site, application, or other product. (As he said in Don't Make Me Think, "It's not rocket surgery".)

Service Design: From Insight to Implementation

ux

We have unsatisfactory experiences when we use banks, buses, health services and insurance companies. They don't make us feel happier or richer. Why are they not designed as well as the products we love to use such as an Apple iPod or a BMW? The 'developed' world has moved beyond the industrial mindset of products and the majority of 'products' that we encounter are actually parts of a larger service network.

These services comprise people, technology, places, time and objects that form the entire service experience. In most cases some of the touchpoints are designed, but in many situations the service as a complete ecology just "happens" and is not consciously designed at all, which is why they don't feel like iPods or BMWs.

One of the goals of service design is to redress this imbalance and to design services that have the same appeal and experience as the products we love, whether it is buying insurance, going on holiday, filling in a tax return, or having a heart transplant.

Another important aspect of service design is its potential for design innovation and intervention in the big issues facing us, such as transport, sustainability, government, finance, communications and healthcare. Given that we live in a service and information age, a practical, thoughtful book about how to design better services is urgently needed.

Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience

ux

The Lean UX approach to interaction design is tailor-made for today’s web-driven reality. In this insightful book, leading advocate Jeff Gothelf teaches you valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques from the ground up—how to rapidly experiment with design ideas, validate them with real users, and continually adjust your design based on what you learn.

Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX lets you focus on the actual experience being designed, rather than deliverables. This book shows you how to collaborate closely with other members of the product team, and gather feedback early and often. You’ll learn how to drive the design in short, iterative cycles to assess what works best for the business and the user. Lean UX shows you how to make this change—for the better.

The UX Book

ux

The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience aims to help readers learn how to create and refine interaction designs that ensure a quality user experience (UX). The book seeks to expand the concept of traditional usability to a broader notion of user experience; to provide a hands-on, practical guide to best practices and established principles in a UX lifecycle; and to describe a pragmatic process for managing the overall development effort.

Designing with the Mind in Mind

UI

Early user interface (UI) practitioners were trained in cognitive psychology, from which UI design rules were based. But as the field evolves, designers enter the field from many disciplines.

Practitioners today have enough experience in UI design that they have been exposed to design rules, but it is essential that they understand the psychology behind the rules in order to effectively apply them. In Designing with the Mind in Mind, Jeff Johnson, author of the best-selling GUI Bloopers, provides designers with just enough background in perceptual and cognitive psychology that UI design guidelines make intuitive sense rather than being just a list of rules to follow.

Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design

UI

In a complex world, products that are easy to use win favor with consumers. This is the first book on the topic of simplicity aimed specifically at interaction designers. It shows how to drill down and simplify user experiences when designing digital tools and applications.

It begins by explaining why simplicity is attractive, explores the laws of simplicity, and presents proven strategies for achieving simplicity. Remove, hide, organize and displace become guidelines for designers, who learn simplicity by seeing before and after examples and case studies where the results speak for themselves.

Designing Interfaces

UI

Despite all of the UI toolkits available today, it's still not easy to design good application interfaces. This bestselling book is one of the few reliable sources to help you navigate through the maze of design options. By capturing UI best practices and reusable ideas as design patterns, Designing Interfaces provides solutions to common design problems that you can tailor to the situation at hand.

This updated edition includes patterns for mobile apps and social media, as well as web applications and desktop software. Each pattern contains full-color examples and practical design advice that you can use immediately. Experienced designers can use this guide as a sourcebook of ideas; novices will find a roadmap to the world of interface and interaction design.

The Best Interface Is No Interface

UI

Our love affair with the digital interface is out of control. We’ve embraced it in the boardroom, the bedroom, and the bathroom.

Screens have taken over our lives. Most people spend over eight hours a day staring at a screen, and some “technological innovators” are hoping to grab even more of your eyeball time. You have screens in your pocket, in your car, on your appliances, and maybe even on your face. Average smartphone users check their phones 150 times a day, responding to the addictive buzz of Facebook or emails or Twitter.

Are you sick? There’s an app for that! Need to pray? There’s an app for that! Dead? Well, there’s an app for that, too! And most apps are intentionally addictive distractions that end up taking our attention away from things like family, friends, sleep, and oncoming traffic.

There’s a better way.

In this book, innovator Golden Krishna challenges our world of nagging, screen-based bondage, and shows how we can build a technologically advanced world without digital interfaces.

In his insightful, raw, and often hilarious criticism, Golden reveals fascinating ways to think beyond screens using three principles that lead to more meaningful innovation. Whether you’re working in technology, or just wary of a gadget-filled future, you’ll be enlightened and entertained while discovering that the best interface is no interface.

About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design

UI

About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, Fourth Edition is the latest update to the book that shaped and evolved the landscape of interaction design. This comprehensive guide takes the worldwide shift to smartphones and tablets into account. New information includes discussions on mobile apps, touch interfaces, screen size considerations, and more. The new full-color interior and unique layout better illustrate modern design concepts.

The interaction design profession is blooming with the success of design-intensive companies, priming customers to expect "design" as a critical ingredient of marketplace success. Consumers have little tolerance for websites, apps, and devices that don't live up to their expectations, and the responding shift in business philosophy has become widespread. About Face is the book that brought interaction design out of the research labs and into the everyday lexicon, and the updated Fourth Edition continues to lead the way with ideas and methods relevant to today's design practitioners and developers.

The Lean Startup

Startup

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in an age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

The Startup Owner’s Manual

Startup

More than 100,000 entrepreneurs rely on this book for detailed, step-by-step instructions on building successful, scalable, profitable startups. The National Science Foundation pays hundreds of startup teams each year to follow the process outlined in the book, and it's taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and more than 100 other leading universities worldwide. Why?

The Startup Owner's Manual guides you, step-by-step, as you put the Customer Development process to work. This method was created by renowned Silicon Valley startup expert Steve Blank, acknowledged catalyst of the "Lean Startup" movement, and tested and refined by him for more than a decade.

Zero To One

Startup

If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets.

The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.

Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.

Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.

Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.

The Startup Equation: A Visual Guidebook to Building Your Startup

Startup

You have a great idea for a new business. Now what? How do you turn that great idea into a viable business? Leveraging visual tools, The Startup Equation leads you to step by step through the decisions you need to make to find your perfect startup model. You'll learn things such as identifying your unique entrepreneurial type, creating a great product, building a great team, finding funding and scaling in addition to other elements essential to crafting a roadmap that fits you and your business.

Drawing from their extensive experience working with startups, entrepreneurs Steve Fisher and Ja-Naé Duane offer expert advice on dealing with the challenges and opportunities that accompany every type of new business. Using visual storytelling, they provide a much-needed blueprint to understanding the startup economy. The authors include illustrative business examples from companies such as TechStars and 500Startups, as well as interviews with over 40 entrepreneurs from across the globe.

Filled with insightful case studies, The Startup Equation is a vibrant, practical guide to creating a winning business model for any startup. By following the accessible visual roadmap within, you'll discover how to build your own successful business plan for your unique dream.

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

Most startups don’t fail because they can’t build a product.
Most startups fail because they can’t get traction.

Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely.

As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die.

Smart entrepreneurs know that the key to success isn’t the originality of your offering, the brilliance of your team, or how much money you raise. It’s how consistently you can grow and acquire new customers (or, for a free service, users). That’s called traction, and it makes everything else easier—fund-raising, hiring, press, partnerships, acquisitions. Talk is cheap, but traction is hard evidence that you’re on the right path.

Lean Analytics

Growth Hacking

Marc Andreesen once said that "markets that don't exist don't care how smart you are." Whether you're a startup founder trying to disrupt an industry, or an intrapreneur trying to provoke change from within, your biggest risk is building something nobody wants.

Lean Analytics can help. By measuring and analyzing as you grow, you can validate whether a problem is real, find the right customers, and decide what to build, how to monetize it, and how to spread the word. Focusing on the One Metric That Matters to your business right now gives you the focus you need to move ahead--and the discipline to know when to change course.

Web Analytics 2.0

Growth Hacking

Adeptly address today’s business challenges with this powerful new book from web analytics thought leader Avinash Kaushik. Web Analytics 2.0 presents a new framework that will permanently change how you think about analytics.

It provides specific recommendations for creating an actionable strategy, applying analytical techniques correctly, solving challenges such as measuring social media and multichannel campaigns, achieving optimal success by leveraging experimentation, and employing tactics for truly listening to your customers. The book will help your organization become more data driven while you become a super analysis ninja!

Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics

Growth Hacking

Google Analytics is the free tool used by millions of web site owners to assess the effectiveness of their efforts. Its revised interface and new features will offer even more ways to increase the value of your website, and this book will teach you how to use each one to best advantage. Featuring new content based on reader and client requests, the book helps you implement new methods and concepts, track social and mobile visitors, use the new multichannel funnel reporting features, understand which filters to use, and much more.

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

Growth Hacking

A new generation of mega brands like Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Twitter haven’t spent a dime on traditional marketing. No press releases, no TV commercials, no billboards. Instead, they rely on a new strategy—growth hacking—to reach many more people despite modest marketing budgets. Growth hackers have thrown out the old playbook and replaced it with tools that are testable, trackable, and scalable. They believe that products and businesses should be modified repeatedly until they’re primed to generate explosive reactions.

Bestselling author Ryan Holiday, the acclaimed marketing guru for American Apparel and many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians, explains the new rules and provides valuable examples and case studies for aspiring growth hackers. Whether you work for a tiny start-up or a Fortune 500 giant, if you’re responsible for building awareness and buzz for a product or service, this is your road map.

Entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow (Wired, Fast Company, The New Yorker, and cofounder of Contently) analyzes the lives of people and companies that do incredible things in an implausibly short time.
How do some startups go from zero to billions in mere months? How did Alexander the Great, YouTube tycoon Michelle Phan, and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon climb to the top in less time than it takes most of us to get a promotion? What do high-growth businesses, world-class heart surgeons, and underdog marketers do in common to beat the norm?
One way or another, they do it like computer hackers. They employ what psychologists call "lateral thinking": rethinking convention and breaking "rules" that aren't rules.
These are not shortcuts, which produce often dubious short-term gains, but ethical "smartcuts" that eliminate unnecessary effort and yield sustainable momentum. In Smartcuts, Snow shatters common wisdom about success, revealing how conventions like "paying dues" prevent progress, why kids shouldn't learn times tables, and how, paradoxically, it's easier to build a huge business than a small one.
From SpaceX to The Cuban Revolution, from Ferrari to Skrillex, Smartcuts is a narrative adventure that busts old myths about success and shows how innovators and icons do the incredible by working smarter - and how perhaps the rest of us can, too.

You Should Test That

Conversion Optimization

Part science and part art, conversion optimization is designed to turn visitors into customers. Carefully developed testing procedures are necessary to help you fine-tune images, headlines, navigation, colors, buttons, and every other element, creating a website that encourages visitors to take the action you seek. This book guides you through creating an optimization strategy that supports your business goals, using appropriate analytics tools, generating quality testing ideas, running online experiments, and making the adjustments that work.

You Should Test That explains both the "why" and the "how" of conversion optimization, helping you maximize the value of your website.

Optimize

Conversion Optimization

Optimize is designed to give readers a practical approach to integrating search and social media optimization with content marketing to boost relevance, visibility, and customer engagement. Companies, large and small, will benefit from the practical planning and creative content marketing tactics in this book that have been proven to increase online performance across marketing, public relations, and customer service. Learn to incorporate essential content optimization and social media engagement principles thereby increasing their ability to acquire and engage relevant customers online. Optimize provides insights from Lee Odden, one of the leading authorities on Content and Online Marketing.

Optimize offers a tested approach for a customer-centric and adaptive online marketing strategy that incorporates the best of content, social media marketing, and search engine optimization tactics.

Convert!

Conversion Optimization

Solve your traffic troubles and turn browsers into buyers
When web design expert Ben Hunt set out to quantify the difference between an ordinary web site and a great one, he expected to find the key in design simplicity. But when his team more than doubled the conversion rates for a wide range of sites, they identified simple yet powerful solutions involving design, copy, appropriate analysis, classic optimization techniques, and targeted testing. You'll find the fixes easy to implement, and they're all right here.

Conversion Optimization: The Art and Science of Converting Prospects to Customers

Conversion Optimization

How do you turn website visitors into customers?

Conversion Optimization offers practical advice on how to persuade visitors to make a buying decision -- without driving them away through data overload or tedious navigation. You'll learn how to use marketing principles, design, usability, and analytics on your site to increase your buyer-to-visitor ratio, whether you're involved with marketing or designing a large ecommerce site, or managing a modest online operation.

Based on the authors' broad experience in helping businesses attract online customers, this book addresses every aspect of the process, from landing visitors to finalizing the sale. You'll learn several techniques for blending successful sales approaches with the particular needs of the people you want to attract. Are you ready to do what it takes to get a double-digit conversion rate?

Always Be Testing

Conversion Optimization

Stop guessing, start testing, and enjoy greater success with your website.
If you’re looking for more leads, sales, and profit from your website, then look no further than this expert guide to Google’s free A/B and multivariate website testing tool, Google Website Optimizer. Recognized online marketing guru and New York Times bestselling author, Bryan Eisenberg, and his chief scientist, John Quarto-vonTivadar, show you how to test and tune your site to get more visitors to contact you, buy from you, subscribe to your services, or take profitable actions on your site.

Take the guesswork out of your online marketing efforts. Let Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer show you why you should test, how to test, and what to test on your site, and ultimately, help you discover what is best for your site and your bottom line.

Are You Looking To Explode Your Social Media Presence? Do you want more followers? Would you like the best and most efficient strategies taken from the best influencers? Do you want to monetize your social media?

When you buy Social Media: Strategies to Mastering your brand for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat, your followers will increase rapidly! You will discover everything you need to know about social media marketing.

These crucial and effective tips will maximize your social media presence. You'll be excited to see all the opportunities from your social media growth and presence just from these advanced strategies.

The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users

social

By now it's clear that whether you're promoting a business, a product, or yourself, social media is near the top of what determines your success or failure. And there are countless pundits, authors, and consultants eager to advise you.

But there’s no one quite like Guy Kawasaki, the legendary former chief evangelist for Apple and one of the pioneers of business blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Tumbling, and much, much more. Now Guy has teamed up with Peg Fitzpatrick, who he says is the best social-media person he’s ever met, to offer The Art of Social Media—the one essential guide you need to get the most bang for your time, effort, and money.

With over one hundred practical tips, tricks, and insights, Guy and Peg present a bottom-up strategy to produce a focused, thorough, and compelling presence on the most popular social-media platforms. They guide you through steps to build your foundation, amass your digital assets, optimize your profile, attract more followers, and effectively integrate social media and blogging.

For beginners overwhelmed by too many choices as well as seasoned professionals eager to improve their game, The Art of Social Media is full of tactics that have been proven to work in the real world. Or as Guy puts it, “great stuff, no fluff.

Struggling with social media marketing for business? No likes, comments, and clicks, no matter what you try? Feeling overwhelmed or just don't even know where to begin?
This book will help.

The key to success on social media is to build a strong and consistent social media marketing plan: with ideas that drive brand awareness, attract loyal customers, and help you reach your business goals - like increasing website traffic, delivering top customer service, or making sales. And that's what you'll learn in 500 Social Media Marketing Tips.

500 Social Media Marketing Tips is your guide to social media success for business, featuring hundreds of actionable strategies for success on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and more!

The goal of this book is simple: I will show you how to build and grow a successful social media marketing strategy for your business. Unlike other books on the subject, 500 Social Media Marketing Tips is uncluttered and concise to ensure that you'll take away something valuable every single time you read, whether it's for five minutes at breakfast, half an hour on your commute, or all day at the weekend!

Likeable Social Media

social

A friend’s recommendation is more powerful than any advertisement. In the world of Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram, and beyond, that recommendation can travel farther and faster than ever before. Packed with brand-new case studies from today’s emerging social sites, this updated edition of Likeable Social Media helps you harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing to transform your business.

Listen to your customers and prospects. Deliver value, excitement, and surprise. And most important, learn how to truly engage your customers and help them spread the word.

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World

social

New York Times bestselling author and social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk shares hard-won advice on how to connect with customers and beat the competition. A mash-up of the best elements of Crush It! and The Thank You Economy with a fresh spin, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook is a blueprint to social media marketing strategies that really works.

When managers and marketers outline their social media strategies, they plan for the “right hook”—their next sale or campaign that’s going to knock out the competition. Even companies committed to jabbing—patiently engaging with customers to build the relationships crucial to successful social media campaigns—want to land the punch that will take down their opponent or their customer’s resistance in one blow. Right hooks convert traffic to sales and easily show results. Except when they don’t.

Thanks to massive change and proliferation in social media platforms, the winning combination of jabs and right hooks is different now. Vaynerchuk shows that while communication is still key, context matters more than ever. It’s not just about developing high-quality content, but developing high-quality content perfectly adapted to specific social media platforms and mobile devices—content tailor-made for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Mad Genius: A Manifesto for Entrepreneurs

Mad Genius is a unique book for entrepreneurs--and for employees who want to think like entrepreneurs. It will help you unleash the innate creative genius inside you.

Every industry has its sacred cows and accepted practices. These are often based upon foundational premises that are no longer valid--if they ever were.

There's a reason Facebook was birthed in a dorm room, Amazon.com came from people not in the bookstore business, and UBER was created by people who weren't from the taxi industry. Innovation, discovery, and creating disruption require blowing up conventional thinking and unleashing your entrepreneurial brilliance.

Mad Genius is a fire hose of creative stimulation that will spark breakthrough ideas and show you how to nurture them.

In the Plex

Entrepreneurship

Written with full cooperation from top management, including cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, this is the inside story behind Google, the most successful and most admired technology company of our time, told by one of our best technology writers.

Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes readers inside Google headquarters—the Googleplex—to show how Google works.

While they were still students at Stanford, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized Internet search. They followed this brilliant innovation with another, as two of Google’s earliest employees found a way to do what no one else had: make billions of dollars from Internet advertising. With this cash cow, Google was able to expand dramatically and take on other transformative projects: more efficient data centers, open-source cell phones, free Internet video (YouTube), cloud computing, digitizing books, and much more.

The key to Google’s success in all these businesses, Levy reveals, is its engineering mind-set and adoption of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk taking. After its unapologetically elitist approach to hiring, Google pampers its engineers—free food and dry cleaning, on-site doctors and masseuses—and gives them all the resources they need to succeed. Even today, with a workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off on every hire.

But has Google lost its innovative edge? With its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful competitor for the first time. Some employees are leaving the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. Can the company that famously decided not to be evil still compete?

No other book has ever turned Google inside out as Levy does with In the Plex.

One-click

Entrepreneurship

Amazon’s business model is deceptively simple: Make online shopping so easy and convenient that customers won’t think twice. It almost can be summed up by the button on every page: “Buy now with one click.”

Why has Amazon been so successful? Much of it has to do with Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO, whose unique combination of character traits and business strategy has driven Amazon to the top of the online retail world. Richard Brandt charts Bezos’s rise from computer nerd to world-changing entrepreneur.

Through interviews with Amazon employees, competitors, and observers, Brandt has deciphered how Bezos makes decisions. The story of Amazon’s ongoing evolution is a case study in how to reinvent an entire industry, and one that businesses today ignore at their peril.

Screw Business As Usual

Entrepreneurship Giles Thomas's Favorite

Richard Branson, one of the world’s most famous and admired business leaders, argues that it’s time to turn capitalism upside down—to shift our values from an exclusive focus on profit to also caring for people, communities and the planet.

As he writes, “My message is a simple one: business as usual isn’t working. In fact, it’s ‘business as usual’ that’s wrecking our planet. Resources are being used up; the air, the sea, the land—are all heavily polluted. The poor are getting poorer. Many are dying of starvation or because they can’t afford a dollar a day for life-saving medicine. . . . Prophesying doom and gloom is simply not my style. . . . I think business can help fix things and create a more prosperous world for everyone. I happen to believe in business because I believe that business can be a force for good. By that I mean doing good is good for business.”

Screw Business as Usual shows how easy it is for both businesses and individuals to embark on a whole new way of doing things, solving major problems and turning our work into something we both love and are proud of.

Anyone Can Do It: Building Coffee Republic from Our Kitchen Table – 57 Real Life Laws on Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

Thinking about starting the business of your dreams? So what's holding you back? Is it the fear of the unknown? If you are even contemplating starting a business of your own, perhaps you feel 'stuck' where you are now? But even being 'stuck' can seem better than facing that fear. That fear of the unknown, of leaving that comfort zone. Entrepreneurship is like an uncharted ocean. But ask yourself this question: Do you have the will and determination to leave dry land and navigate the choppy and sometimes daunting waters that lie before you?

If so, then Anyone Can Do It can help you tackle some of those fears, to answer some of the elusive questions about what an entrepreneur must face when making the decision to go for (what can sometimes seem like) that unattainable dream. Authors Sahar and Bobby Hashemi are the dynamic brother and sister team who started one of the most recognizable and high-profile brands in the United Kingdom today - Coffee Republic.

Sahar and Bobby had to leave their comfort zones too, leaving secure jobs to take the plunge. But this is not a business memoir nor mere corporate history. This is a personal story about two ordinary people who 'did it', and who got it right. Anyone Can Do It is an inspirational book that chronicles the start and evolution of a genuine success story. Sahar and Bobby take you through their first conversations (when the seed of the idea was planted), to writing the business plan, finding a name, raising money, opening the first store, taking the company public and to the present day when Coffee Republic turns over millions, employs thousands of individuals and has over 100 outlets around the United Kingdom.

Anyone Can Do It offers a myriad of lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs and blows apart the myth that only 'special' people start successful businesses. It's written in an informal style and packed with tips, advice and quotes. Throughout the text are copies of original business plans, early brainstorms and the cruel and duly ignored bank rejection letters.

Sahar and Bobby take the reader step by step through every aspect of starting a business. The process for them wasn't always easy but one thing is for sure, it was the most rewarding journey either of them has taken.

SEO 2017 is now updated covering the latest changes to Google's algorithm, and walks you through all major updates and how to use them to your advantage. This book also reveals industry secrets about staying ahead of Google's algorithm, and what potential Google changes may be coming up in 2017. With this best-selling SEO book you can learn SEO from a fundamental level, achieve top rankings, and generate a wave of new customers to your site.

Many businesses and marketers toss up a brochure-style website, do a little social media and blog posting (if any), and think they’re "doing SEO" — but that’s not what it takes to get those coveted first page Google rankings.

No longer just another tactic, search engine optimization has become a full-blown channel on par with PR and advertising — one you can’t afford to ignore. From website designers to business owners, marketers to entrepreneurs, everyone can benefit from understanding and applying SEO best practices.

John Jantsch, author of the best-selling Duct Tape Marketing and creator of the Duct Tape Marketing System™, and Phil Singleton, an experienced SEO consultant with years of experience at the local, regional, and national levels, have teamed up to provide you with the only Internet marketing guide you need. In SEO for Growth, they teach you how to leverage the new rules of search engine optimization to make sure your website gets found online. Jantsch and Singleton harness the knowledge they’ve acquired through years of experience and extensive research, explaining SEO in a direct and accessible manner, to help you navigate this complex technical terrain with purpose and ease.

Rather, SEO Like I'm 5 is the ultimate beginner's training system for forward-thinking businesses and entrepreneurs that will get you found on Google, social media, and blogs.

You will also learn how to attract followers and leads like a magnet by building a vibrant community around your content, which both users and search engines will love, and leveraging untapped, high-growth platforms and social networks. Lastly, you will learn how to make money online and monetize your content like a pro.

When it comes to SEO, you can spend all your time studying the roots, or you can just learn to pick the fruit. With the 2nd, 2015-updated edition of "SEO Like I'm 5," our approach lets you focus on picking up the fruit, not studying the tree.

In addition to taking you through the strategic process of building and optimizing your online presence, "SEO Like I'm 5" features dozens of free tools, 'under-the-hood' hacks, case studies, real-world examples, and actionable tips.

More than a book - a workbook. While other books on SEO are either just junk put up to sell consulting services or esoteric mumbo-jumbo by experts, for experts, the SEO fitness workbook speaks in plain English and provides practical step-by-step instructions on how to optimize your website to the top of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The book is built upon years of real experience, and the teaching methodology of Jason McDonald, used in his classes in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Stanford University's Continuing Studies program.

The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization

seo

Three acknowledged experts in search engine optimization share guidelines and innovative techniques that will help you plan and execute a comprehensive SEO strategy. Complete with an array of effective tactics from basic to advanced, this third edition prepares digital marketers for 2016 with updates on SEO tools and new search engine optimization methods that have reshaped the SEO landscape.

Novices will receive a thorough SEO education, while experienced SEO practitioners get an extensive reference to support ongoing engagements.

Learning Google AdWords and Google Analytics

Google Adwords (PPC)

Learning Google AdWords and Google Analytics is going to launch and advance thousands of successful careers in digital advertising and digital analytics around the world. Learn from an expert who designs and presents hundreds of courses, including courses for Google.

Internationally recognised educator, digital course designer, consultant and conference speaker, Benjamin Mangold, shares his passion, experience and knowledge of real life campaigns and customers. Learn from an expert who cares and knows how to share.

Google AdWords for Beginners: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to PPC Advertising

Google Adwords (PPC)

Learn how to increase web traffic and sales using Google AdWords. Google's AdWords platform enables you to create pay-per-click advertisements that appear as ‘sponsored links’ when someone searches for content related to your product or service. You bid for the position to place your ad, and you only pay when someone clicks. It’s that simple. If used correctly, AdWords can garner higher targeted traffic, which in turn will increase your conversion rates and profits. So, AdWords will definitely help your business, but you have no idea how to utilize them.

What should you do? Take a couple of hours to read this book. Google AdWords for Beginners is designed to teach you the fundamentals of AdWords, how it works, why it works, and the proven techniques that you can use to make it work for you and your business. Additionally, this book details an eight-step blueprint that has consistently delivered positive results for companies. Upon completion, you'll be armed with the knowledge to launch profitable campaigns or drastically improve an existing one.

The Google AdWords Survival Guide: How To Keep Your Head Above Water, Outsmart Your Competitors, Prevent Bleeding Budget and Grow Your Local Business With Google AdWords

Google Adwords (PPC)

Hundreds of companies in your local area, including yours, are competing for pivotal exposure on search engines like Google, but only a select few are playing the pay-per-click game correctly. Google AdWords is the epitome of sink-or-swim advertising – you either win or you lose. The odds are stacked against you from the start, and it's not your fault. In fact, 97% of small businesses fail at gaining any consistent momentum with Google AdWords. And this book can be your lifesaver! There has never been a greater opportunity to seize control of your advertising strategy and make every penny count towards bringing in new customers, client or patients.

There are now more tools and technology at your disposal to help you reach your ideal customers and generate high quality leads from targeted ad campaigns. With more than one million leads under his belt and over a decade of experience managing advertising budgets both large and small, lead generation and conversion expert Steve Teneriello walks you through his playbook in what he does to make the phone ring for his clients.

Since the previous edition, there have been a number of revolutionary changes in paid search. First, we are increasingly searching from our cell phones rather than desktop computers. Second, Google is no longer the only game in town. Bing now accounts for 30 percent of all U.S. searches. Finally, "search extensions" have become a powerful new technique you can use to collect phone numbers and email addresses with your ads, limit your ads to certain times of day, deliver coupons to nearby customers, and even provide handy "call me" buttons that are displayed only on cell phones. In this new edition, Stokes details all this and more.

D&AD Copy Book

copy

In 1995, the D&AD published a book on the art of writing for advertising. Though now outdated, the best-selling book remains an important reference work today—a bible for creative directors. D&AD and TASCHEN have joined forces to bring you an updated and redesigned edition of the publication, including works from the last 15 years.

Regarded as the most challenging field in advertising, copywriting is usually left to the most talented professionals—often agency leaders or owners themselves. The book features a work selection and essays by 48 leading professionals in the world, including copywriting superstars such as David Abbott, Lionel Hunt, Steve Hayden, Dan Wieden, Neil French, Mike Lescarbeau, Adrian Holmes, and Barbara Nokes. Looking for the clues to well-written, effective, and compelling stories that make great advertising? Look no further.

Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This

copy

Hey Whipple, Squeeze This has helped generations of young creatives make their mark in the field. From starting out and getting work, to building successful campaigns, you gain a real-world perspective on what it means to be great in a fast-moving, sometimes harsh industry. You'll learn how to tell brand stories and create brand experiences online and in traditional media outlets, and you'll learn more about the value of authenticity, simplicity, storytelling, and conflict.

Advertising is in the midst of a massive upheaval, and while creativity is still king, it's not nearly enough. This book is an essential resource for advertising professionals who need up-to-date digital skills to reach the modern consumer.

Words That Sell

copy

Looking for a better way to say "authentic?" Words That Sell gives you 57 alternatives. How about "appealing?" Take your pick from 76 synonyms. You'll even find more than 100 variations on "exciting." Fully updated and expanded, this edition of the copywriting classic is packed with inspiration-on-demand for busy professionals who need to win customers--by mail, online, or in person.

Ogilvy on Advertising

Made to Stick

copy

Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas–business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others–struggle to make their ideas “stick.”

Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the “human scale principle,” using the “Velcro Theory of Memory,” and creating “curiosity gaps.”

In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds–from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony–draw their power from the same six traits.

Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It’s a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures)–the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of “the Mother Teresa Effect”; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice. Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas–and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.

The Complete E-Commerce Book

Ecommerce

The Complete E-Commerce Book offers a wealth of information on how to design, build and maintain a successful web-based business.... Many of the chapters are filled with advice and information on how to incorporate current e-business principles

E-Business and E-Commerce Management (4th Edition)

Ecommerce

This bestselling textbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of e-business and e-commerce management. The author, Dave Chaffey, brings his trademarks of authority, clarity of expression and teaching expertise to bear on a subject in which he actively lectures and consults.

Popular for its cutting-edge and contemporary coverage, this text offers an international approach and a good balance between the technical and managerial topics of central importance to developing an understanding of this subject. It is an engaging read, packed with real-life examples and case studies.

Developed for students studying e-business or e-commerce at undergraduate or postgraduate level, and also used by many business managers, this is the essential text to keep pace with technology, strategy and implementation.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos And The Age Of Amazon

Ecommerce Giles Thomas's Favorite

Amazon.com's visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now.

Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, and his book is the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. The Everything Store is the book that the business world can't stop talking about, the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.

Boost E-Commerce Sales and Make More Money

Ecommerce

Anyone selling products or services online can benefit from this book. You will learn exactly how to make your website more successful and increase the amount of money you make from your website or e-commerce store. This also includes clear, actionable steps for you to increase retention and create loyal customers that will come back to spend more money. Plus, you can get examples of each case study listed in the book.

In this book, there are three hundred different tactics to increase conversions, generate more leads, and maximize ROI. The key is to find the most profitable tasks and start with those. The advice outlined should be organized into an annual marketing calendar. A marketing calendar is an organized schedule of when you need to create and promote the marketing throughout the year. This way, you can proactively set up the success of your e-commerce website.

Ask.

Ecommerce

Do you know how to find out what people really want to buy?

(Not what you think they want, not what they say they want, but what they really want?)
The secret is asking the right questions - and the right questions are not what you might expect.
Ask is based on the compelling premise that you should NEVER have to guess what your prospects and customers are thinking. The Ask Formula revealed in this book has been used to help build multi-million dollar businesses in 23 different industries, generating over $100 million dollars in sales in the process.

You‘ll discover why the Ask Formula is arguably THE most powerful way to discover EXACTLY what people want to buy and how to give it to them - and in a way that makes people fall in love with you and your company.

You‘ll discover how Ryan Levesque developed his proven system for creating survey-based, customized sales funnels. And you ‘ll also learn how YOU can implement the same system in your own business - no matter your market. The Ask Formula blueprint is laid out in clear and detailed steps for anyone to use and adapt.

Whether you‘re an aspiring Internet entrepreneur, advanced online marketer, or established business owner, this book will both inspire you and show you how to skyrocket your online income - while creating a mass of raving fans in the process - simply by asking the right questions in a surprisingly different way. For people looking to scale up their business, Ask. will utterly transform how you think about consumer behavior and selling online.

The 4-Hour Workweek

Entrepreneurship Giles Thomas's Favorite

Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan–there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, or earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, The 4-Hour Workweek is the blueprint.

Good To Great

Entrepreneurship Giles Thomas's Favorite

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't is a management book by Jim C. Collins that describes how companies transition from being good companies to great companies, and how most companies fail to make the transition.

Delivering Happiness

Entrepreneurship Giles Thomas's Favorite

In Delivering Happiness, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh shares the different lessons he has learned in business and life, from starting a worm farm to running a pizza business, through LinkExchange, Zappos, and more. Fast-paced and down-to-earth, DELIVERING HAPPINESS shows how a very different kind of corporate culture is a powerful model for achieving success-and how by concentrating on the happiness of those around you, you can dramatically increase your own.

The Fountainhead

Entrepreneurship Giles Thomas's Favorite

This modern classic is the story of intransigent young architect Howard Roark, whose integrity was as unyielding as granite...of Dominique Francon, the exquisitely beautiful woman who loved Roark passionately, but married his worst enemy...and of the fanatic denunciation unleashed by an enraged society against a great creator. As fresh today as it was then, Rand’s provocative novel presents one of the most challenging ideas in all of fiction—that man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress…

The Obstacle Is the Way

Entrepreneurship Giles Thomas's Favorite

The book draws its inspiration from stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy of enduring pain or adversity with perseverance and resilience. Stoics focus on the things they can control, let go of everything else, and turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to get better, stronger, tougher. As Marcus Aurelius put it nearly 2000 years ago: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Ryan Holiday shows us how some of the most successful people in history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—have applied stoicism to overcome difficult or even impossible situations. Their embrace of these principles ultimately mattered more than their natural intelligence, talents, or luck.

If you’re feeling frustrated, demoralized, or stuck in a rut, this book can help you turn your problems into your biggest advantages. And along the way it will inspire you with dozens of true stories of the greats from every age and era.